For the past 30 years, we have worked closely with you to build business intelligence (BI) and enterprise reporting solutions that help your organization fulfill its mission. Joining forces with organizations across every industry segment, we have developed an in-depth understanding of the strategic business requirements that our customers face.

To empower customers like you to more quickly and easily realize the benefits of enterprise reporting, we are introducing our enhanced Best Practices program. Codifying the knowledge that our experts have built over 30 years of hands-on experience and feedback spanning our customer base, we are making that knowledge available through an array of training, seminars, and extensive reports detailing all aspects of implementing best practices to ensure the strategic utility of business intelligence.

Starting with 10 core best practices areas, the program addresses issues ranging from determining the strategic utility of BI to assessing organizational readiness, applying effective data management and integration, and conducting efficient change management, implementing robust security, and more.

Through the program, we highlight key considerations and critical success factors for implementing business intelligence across the enterprise, and expose a variety of approaches as well as the strengths, limitations, risks, and projected impact of each approach on the business and technical processes. And we continue to renew our knowledge base as we work with you.

In short, this is a huge departure from traditional practice in the IT industry, where best practices programs are often restricted to questionnaires and checklists that require customers – or highly paid consultants – to devise the answers.

Under Organizational Readiness, for example, we help you analyze the vision driving a project. That involves analyzing factors such as alignment with strategic objectives, competitive pressures, customer demand, and control points. It also examines the competition for funding and resources that is inevitable in any organization and discusses risk-mitigation factors when resources are up for grabs. And, the program deals with key supporting issues such as market share and system adoption effects on the organization itself.

We have always sought to become your trusted advisor in enterprise reporting and BI. With our new Best Practices program, we are expanding the ways that your organization can leverage our 30 years of experience helping our customers satisfy their strategic reporting and business intelligence needs.

Over the coming months, we will be adding more detailed resources designed to improve your team's chances of success. And you can look forward to highlights of key findings from our growing library of best practices to be published in Insights.

As any experienced BI project lead would testify, it is absolutely critical to get users involved in the design because those are the people who will actually use the system. But, as Rich Pedott, vice president of planning and allocation at specialty retailer Eastern Mountain Sports (EMS) told us, there is a delicate balance for project leads on when to direct, and when to get out of the way.

Pedott directed a WebFOCUS implementation that is now used by hundreds of people, from analysts at headquarters to store managers.

"You have to provide structure for them," he said, noting that it's best for the project lead to direct the process of collecting and analyzing end user requirements. At that point, Pedott explains, end users might know their pain points, but they may not have a clear idea of the solution they need.

But once he framed their requirements and presented a rough mockup, it was time for users to take the reins to refine and enhance his sketch. "Nailing down the target was really important in helping us evaluate trade-off decisions," he said, adding, "Otherwise, it's all too easy to end up with scope creep, where you never get finished."

Etta Levine is editorial director for Information Builders' Insights and editor in chief of Information Builders Magazine. To provide feedback go to www.informationbuilders.com/insightstalkback

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